Sharalike tries to bring your slideshow into the virtual world

Wait, wait, wait! Before your eyes glaze over at the word “slideshow,” stay with me for a moment. Yes, we’re all bored to tears with slideslows, but Sharalike‘s brand new VR app has been rubbing its medical paddles together to try to jolt some life into your old 2D photos by teleporting them into your VR headset.

Exploring Sharalike photo slideshows in VR is a trippy experience.

The company’s new app is available for Android, iOS and Oculus, enabling you to create immersive slideshows. The company’s tech analyzes your images to try to find a theme before adding a suitable background video and some funky tunes.

The experience of creating a VR slideshow is pretty intuitive and relatively easy to figure out, although actually learning to view a slideshow is a curious experience. It turns out that as a photographer, I have a well-established set of feelings around how I am expecting to consume slideshows. Moving that habit to VR is an unHeimlich experience that will take a bit of getting used to.

The original Sharalike app was launched around 18 months ago and became a smash hit, with more than 1.3 million downloads and more than 30 million photos converted into smart slideshows, so the company does have a tremendous amount of success under its belt. On the VR side of things, the challenge the company is facing is one of resolution. We live in a world where we’re used to Retina displays for watching photographs in perfect, super-crisp resolutions. Even the best VR displays can’t match a reasonably good screen for resolution and picture-viewing experience, but it’s refreshing that there’s still hope for your old-fashioned photos, even in a 360° / VR world.